The Many Flaws of Conservative Internationalism

What I do object to is his running away from his neoconservative roots. In doing so, he obscures the fact that his formula has been tried before, not only by the good presidents he likes and thinks did well well with…but also those other presidents in whose hands conservative internationalism led to wrack and ruin. This is the central weakness of Nau’s argument: it advances a form of conservatism that has been tried and failed already.

In addition to running away from the neoconservatism that his idea closely copies, Nau wants to pick and choose from other traditions to give it some added appeal. Like the foreign policy he espouses, Nau isn’t willing to accept trade-offs between traditions and doesn’t want to set priorities, but would like to have a little something that each faction in the Republican coalition will find palatable. In his own account of what he thinks conservative internationalism entails, Nau writes:

A conservative-internationalist strategy embraces the promotion of freedom touted by liberal internationalists, the balancing of power advocated by realists, the respect for national will and sovereignty championed by nationalists, and the diplomacy backed by force recommended by neoconservatives.

Right away, we can see the Nau is making some significant omissions and redefinitions to create his hybrid. No one, except perhaps a die-hard neoconservative, believes that “diplomacy backed by force” is something that neoconservatives favor, since there is no American foreign policy tradition more allergic to resolving disputes through diplomacy than neoconservatism. It’s true that they are always first to agitate for the use of force, and they insist on retaining the military option as a possible response to virtually every crisis, but they are reliably horrified by diplomatic engagement if it means that the U.S. doesn’t end up taking military action.

Like neoconservatives, Nau is enamored of democracy promotion, but in his version he would repeat and magnify the mistakes of Bush’s “freedom agenda” as it related to the former Soviet Union and apply them to the countries surrounding both Russia and China. Nau writes:

American foreign policy should seek to increase the number of regimes that are democratic, not just to preserve global stability or defend national borders. But it would seek to do so primarily on the borders of countries where freedom already exists, not in areas such as the Middle East (Iraq) or southwest Asia (Afghanistan). Today the borders of freedom stretch in Europe from Turkey through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland to the Baltic states, and in Asia from India through Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan to South Korea. The greatest threats along these borders come from the major authoritarian states of Russia and China, not from terrorists and rogue states.

So instead of fruitless crusading in the Near East, Nau proposes genuinely dangerous ideological agitation directed against the two major powers in Eurasia. This compounds the major errors of Bush-era foreign policy instead of correcting for them. It doesn’t seem to matter to Nau that his chief empirical claim that “democracy is weaker today on the frontiers of freedom in both Europe and Asia” isn’t accurate, nor is he concerned that the last attempt to do exactly what he recommends failed spectacularly. He treats the past failure of democracy promotion as if it were simply a matter of geography rather than something inherent in the policy. In practice, Nau would have the U.S. agitating for regime change in Belarus and, I suppose, Laos, which might alarm Russia and China to nor purpose while advancing not one concrete American interest.

Nau’s notion of “diplomacy backed by force” is similarly misguided:

The United States should instead be willing to use force before and during negotiations, when it is a choice, not just after negotiations fail, when it is a necessity.

In other words, diplomacy must not simply be backed by the threat of the future use of force, but preceded and accompanied by military build-ups, deployments, and military action. Nau’s answer to a foreign policy debate that is already far too biased in favor of military action and threats is to propose an even more aggressive reliance on and use of military power. He goes so far as to argue that the use of force “does not disrupt negotiations,” which is akin to saying that war does not disrupt peace. Needless to say, negotiations that were preceded and accompanied by military attacks would simply lead to many more wars that should never have been fought. Nau says that conservative internationalism “offers a way to stay engaged in the world at a price the American people can accept,” but he badly misunderstands what “engagement” means and misreads what Americans are willing to accept.

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9 Responses to The Many Flaws of Conservative Internationalism

“A conservative-internationalist strategy embraces the promotion of freedom touted by liberal internationalists, the balancing of power advocated by realists, the respect for national will and sovereignty championed by nationalists, and the diplomacy backed by force recommended by neoconservatives.”

In other words, the model being advocated for stacks the deck three to one, or more, in favor of military intervention.

Neo cons almost always favor some form of military intervention, that’s what makes them what they are. Liberal internationalists have lost their way, and what used to be considered “liberal,” eg let Third World countries find their own way, has now been replaced by neo colonialism masquerading not, as the author would have it, as a “freedom” agenda (that, along with “democracy” is more on the neo con side of the street), but as a faux “human rights” agenda.

And “Nationalists,” as he describes them, sound, to me, like neo cons, avante la lettre. Or after it. Demanding “respect” for “national will” and “sovereignty” seems fairly bellicose. Like Manifest Destiny, or Teddy Roosevelt. Like someone looking for a fight, perhaps even operating under the theory that countries get too “soft” without war, and that kind of “National Greatness”/David Brooks BS.

On the other side, all we have are the “realists,” and even they are said to favor a balance of power. And that can be a recipe for war as often as it is for peace.

So, three to one, three and a half to one?

How about, instead, a conservative foreign policy that ditches neo con, Jacobin obsessions with democratization entirely? That takes what’s best in liberal internationalism not by using war to “promote freedom, or “human rights” but by using the global and regional institutions set up by those liberal internationalists to remove, or, at least, reduce the incidence of, force from State to State relations. That we promote freedom and human rights not by war but by example, and by being, as Lincoln said, the hope of the world, not its terror? And that “nationalism” is meant as promoting the best interests of the USA, which usually means avoiding war, not those of Israel, or any other foreign State, or, indeed, any ideology (democracy, freedom, human rights, capitalism, etc). Our “sovereignty” is best served by not undermining the notion of sovereignty itself. And, finally, from the realists, recognizing the true costs of war, in lives, in money, in the good opinion of the world (which actually has a value) and in undermining the very institutions and world order which we rely on.

And the result of such a conservative FP would be not simply changing the preferred location of windmills at which to tilt from the Middle East to, as Mr. Larison puts it, Belarus and Laos, but avoiding such activity altogether.

I’m familiar with the “backed by force” part, but I’m having trouble recalling the “diplomacy” part. Anyone else hear tell of this chimera called “neoconservative diplomacy”? I mean, aside from Politburo style spontaneous demonstrations for Bibi on the House floor …

A conservative-internationalist strategy embraces the promotion of freedom touted by liberal internationalists, the balancing of power advocated by realists, the respect for national will and sovereignty championed by nationalists, and the diplomacy backed by force recommended by neoconservatives.

Couple things jumped out at me.
1) Turkey is not a beacon of freedom and is fast becoming a rival to all its neighbours.
2) Any foreign policy analyst that picks up China and Russia as, the problem nations of the hour is a simplistic thinker and prone to repeating the diplomatic movements of the past. They are more than likely to miss the opportunities of the new for America. The goal of a serious foreign policy would be to make China and Russia strategic partners for the evolving world order.
3)Saudi Arabia and Sunni Islam as a whole are a geo-strategic problem for the World to manage. 9/11 should have made that clear but it did not because a strong faction of the US elite likes the Arab gas station and thinks that caving in on cultural issues throughout the World is all right for a few more bucks. America needs to be working with countries that have an interest in keeping the Sunni Genie boxed. For this reason alone, ignoring what may be happening to the climate, a Western shift away from hydrocarbons can not happen soon enough.

Meanwhile Nau wants America to play nostalgically in the cold war sand box.

“A conservative-internationalist strategy embraces the promotion of freedom touted by liberal internationalists, the balancing of power advocated by realists, the respect for national will and sovereignty championed by nationalists, and the diplomacy backed by force recommended by neoconservatives.”

But not the mind our own business policy advocated by non-interventionists, which is what we need.

There is too much jumping at shadows in these reactions to my book on Conservative Internationalism. Read carefully, the book identifies multiple restraints or breaks on military intervention: 1) first make sure there is a serious threat, 2) stay to promote freedom only in countries on the borders of existing freedom (in others such as Iraq and Afghanistan, as earlier in Vietnam, deal with threat and get out as quickly as possible), 3) cash in military leverage for interim compromises, and 4) listen to the American people if they decide you have gone too far, as they did by 2005 in both Iraq and Afghanistan.